Study: Critical data loss the biggest fear for IT managers

The study, which sought the views of 715 IT managers across Europe and the Middle East, found that 62 per cent of respondents expressed concerns about managing distributed data storage, and a third lack faith in decentralised storage of business-critical information on servers, PCs and mobile devices.

The report also shows a discrepancy between the IT managers’ awareness of risk and the action they actually take.  While 86 per cent of respondents stress that losing business data would hurt their company, 32 per cent have not implemented a suitable service level agreement (SLA) strategy to mitigate the risk of data loss and set acceptable recovery time objectives.

“To effectively understand and address business risk, IT managers must understand both the service-level requirements of the business and the potential operational impact that infrastructure events can have on those service levels,” said Duncan Fisken, vice-president, solutions management EMEA at CA.

  “Managers who fail to develop this understanding won't be able to design or implement appropriate data storage, management, and recovery processes.”

According to the research, only 38 per cent of the companies surveyed use email archiving, 30 per cent have implemented workflow and document management and 20 per cent are equipped for federated search and discovery. 

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